The Cybernetics of Conceptual Systems

Abstract

Cybernetics in the United States has evolved through three identifiable periods. In the first period of the 1950s and 1960s there was a primary concern with designing control systems and with building machines to emulate human reasoning. In the second period of the 1970s and 1980s the focus of attention was on the biology of cognition and constructivist philosophy. In recent years increasing attention has been given to social systems. Whereas the work on the biology of cognition required that attention be shifted from what was observed to the observer, the recent interest in social systems requires an emphasis on multiple observers and their beliefs. The third period of social cybernetics or the cybernetics of conceptual systems is illustrated by considering constructivist cybernetics as a conceptual system created to promote the evolution of certain social systems in a preferred direction.